A blog about why games make us happy and how they can change the world.

Saturday, December 29, 2007

Work, Work, Work - How I Spent My 2007, or, a Year in Review

I was so busy working in 2007, I forgot to blog about most of it! So here is a top 10 countdown looking back at the ideas and projects that I'm very glad were a part of my year, most of which I didn't give enough attention to on this blog.

I'm including links to my favorite articles, slide decks, and videos so you can go check out anything you missed. Happy New Year!

1.Favorite Change in Mission Statement - "Happiness Hacking"

Early in 2007, I was wrestling with my purpose in life as a game designer. I think a lot about human suffering, and how we don't suffer when we're immersed in games. There's clearly a lot of benevolent power there waiting to be tapped in everyday life and society.

An so I crafted a new mission statement my work as a game designer -- the goal of using new scientific research on well-being to develop technological systems that actually improve quality of life. If you need a quick crash course in well-being research, I recommend two places: All of the great field-building positive psychology work done by Martin Seligman at U Penn, and the work by Allister McGregor and other to look at well-being in developing countries at the ESRC Research Group.

Thanks to a small grant from the MacArthur Foundation's digital youth research initiative, I was able to spend part of 2007 writing up the most rigorous and detailed explanation of how I tackle the design problem of creating collective intelligence in a gaming community.

I also had a chance to break this research theme down for a broader audience with my first major editorial ever -- "Gamers Have Skills -- Let's Tap 'Em" for the Christian Science Monitor.

3. Favorite Deliverable - "The 10 Collaboration Superpowers"

For my first major game at the Institute for the Future, I worked with the amazing Jason Tester (who, among other things, designs tangible artifacts from the future) to create a half-day immersive experience for the 2007 Ten Year Forecast. (If you're curious, you can read the executive summary of the Ten Year Forecast.)

A major part of the game, which was MMO/quest-like, was a set of skills we originally dubbed "superheroes 2.0", but which I'm now calling the 10 collaboration superpowers. We had players self-identify their core superpowers, and then features a dozen missions requiring different combinations and quantities of superpower strengths.

Executives flew in from around the country to take part in the game, and it was written up a New York Times article about innovative uses of gaming in the business world ("Why Work Is Looking More Like a Videogame").

The superheroes game was a blast, and since then, I've found so many different ways to use the superpowers. I'm constantly thinking of games and missions to design that test and strengthen these skills.This list has become an integral part of most of my presentations and design processes. If you haven't seen them yet, you can get a quickfire summary is this short slide deck: "10 Collaboration Superpowers".

4. Favorite New Crazy Idea - Massively Multiplayer Science

In a nutshell: Wrapping serious scientific work in an alternate reality game framework to engage interdisciplinary researchers, knowledgable amauters, and even the general public in massively collaborative scientific research. I can't explain this idea any better than I did in my talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) earlier this year. Here's a summary and slides about Massively Multiplayer Science.

I was also thrilled to be invited to keynote at IIASA's 35th Anniversary Meeting, along with Thomas Schelling and Jeffrey Sachs, to talk about the potential future intersections of scientific research and collaborative gaming. You can read a transcript of my talk "Amplified Intelligence Games for Global Development", as well as watch a streaming video of it, and look at the slides on IIASA's conference website. This might have been my favorite talk of the year -- although it was quite nerve-wracking to present these ideas to a room full of scientists and senior government officials (presidents, ministers, and so on) from more than a dozen countries.

The best part: IFTF is letting me push this idea forward with an alternate reality game for scientists. It's called the X2 Project Game, and it is a great, crazy idea that is getting oversight from the National Academy of Sciences. More on that in 2008!5. Favorite Game Project - World Without Oil

Looking back, I'm so happy with how this project, which was conceived and directed by the brilliant Ken Eklund, played out. It was a highly successful proof-of-concept: the first "serious" alternate reality game, explicitly designed to harness the collaborative imagination of gamers to tackle a real-world problem.

It also revealed, somewhat unexpectedly, that alternate reality gaming can serve as an extremely powerful new, massively multiplayer forecasting platform -- something I'm particularly interested in developing further in my role as resident game designer for the Intsitute for the Future. I'm going to write up some research about it in 2008.

In the meantime, if you haven't been to the World Without Oil website in awhile, check it out -- it has been transformed into an immersive archive of the game, with multiple themed guided tours of the player-created content, lesson plans for teachers, a seven-minute behind-the-scenes mini-documentary about the project, and lots more.6. Favorite Live Game Event- Cruel 2 B Kind World Championships

In April, I ran a Cruel 2 B Kind game in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco that wound up featuring more than 200 players from a dozen different states and four countries. So I turned it into an impromptu world championship for the game.

The SOMA game was captured brilliantly by Current TV, and in fact, the short video was just named one the top stories of the year at Current! If you haven't watched it yet, see Cruel 2 B Kind in action on Current TV.

This particular event was also was prominently featured in my favorite press clipping of the year -- a great SF Weekly Cover story by Eliza Strickland: "Future Games."

7. Favorite New Terminology - "Amplified Individuals"This fall, I had the chance to co-author a really exciting research article at the Institute for the Future with Mike Love, the collaborative media designer at IFTF. The article is called "Amplified Individuals", and it looks at "extreme network users" as a new class of highly innovative thinkers and producers.

Mike and I outlined four new modes of amplification that are enabling individuals to do more, learn faster, and leverage the power of human-human and human-computer collaboration. We call these four modes "highly social", "highly collective", "highly augmented", and "highly improvisational". We presented the research at the annual Technology Horizons conference in October.

For now the complete paper is available only to research members of the Institute. In about a year, it will show up in the public IFTF library. (Plenty of treasures to read there now.) In the meantime, here's a very short excerpt. And stay tuned for the term trickling into my work and presentations!

"Amplified individuals share four important characteristics. First, they are highly social. They use tagging software, wikis, social networks, and other human intelligence aggregators to supplement their individual knowledge and to understand what their individual contributions mean in the bigger picture, giving meaning to even the most menial tasks. Amplified individuals are highly collective, taking advantage of online collaboration software, mobile communications tools, and immersive virtual environments to engage globally distributed team members with highly specialized and complementary capacities. Amplified individuals are also highly improvisational, capable of banding together to form effective networks and infrastructures, both social and professional. Finally, amplified individuals are highly augmented. They employ visualization tools, attention filters, e-displays, and ambient presence systems to enhance their cognitive abilities and coordination skills, thus enabling them to quickly access and process massive amounts of information."

8. Favorite Follow-Up - The "Ministry of Reshelving" LivesYou probably remember the controversial Ministry of Reshelving mini-game that I developed in 2005. I was finally able to publish some design notes and results of the project in a great new game studies collection called Space Time Play. (I also have another more theoretical essay in that volume, called "Ubiquitous Gaming - A Vision for the Future of Enchanting Spaces".)

The essay, "The Ministry of Reshelving: Political, Pervasive Game Design" includes a kind of Harper's Weekly Index style report, with fun and highly interpretable statistics as:

"Participants prefered to submit evidence of their missions via email rather than contribute to a central public pool by a ration of 23:1. Book sellers, librarians, and writers were more supportive of the project than bookstore customers and library patrons by a factor of roughly ten."

I wish I had time to write up all of my game experiments this way, but I'm really glad I made time to this year for the Ministry game.

Also, and more importantly, two of my partners-in-crime for this project (Monica and George) were married this fall (yay!). (I married the fourth partner-in-crime shortly after the project launched in 2005!) I was asked to give a toast at Monica and George's wedding reception, and so naturally I quoted George Orwell. That was about as happy a wrap to the project as I could imagine.

9. Favorite New Allies - my new friends in Sydney, Orlando, and DetroitI traveled a lot and spoke at many conferences this year, many that were completely new to me and outside my typical domain of game or technology conferences. Three in particular stood out to me as being amazing events, organized by brilliant, passionate people, and I consider myself extremely lucky to have crossed paths with them. Indeed, I hope to be able to continue crossing paths with them in 2008!

Without babbling too much about why I love them and why they are so awesome, let me just mention them, so that if you are ever invited to attend, talk, or otherwise cross paths with them, you can remember to say yes! They are: the AMP Innovation and Thought Leadership Festival, organized by the amazing Annalie Killian; the astoundingly well-designed and programmed Learning Conference, put together by the brilliant Elliot Masie; and the meeting of the Council of Michigan Foundations, led by the fabulous Rob Collier, and who as a group are doing some of the most innovative and fearless foundation work I've come across. I'm so grateful to have met these three individuals and to have learned about the great work they're doing with their organizations.

10. Favorite Secret Project - "you don't think I would actually give away the name here, now do you?"If you have me on your AIM buddy list, you may have noticed something strange. For the past six months, I have been describing my current location as "at the secret office" with increasing frequency. That's because I am working with a very large team on a very secret game!

Obviously, I can't say much now. But roughly half of 2007, I have been directing the design and development of what is the biggest, and I honestly think best, game I have worked on. No kidding. The scope and scale of the project is insane. And the playtesting has been off the charts in terms of fun, fun, fun.

It's not serious, it's pure entertainment, although I frankly think that it will be a force for good in the world and something that players will remember for the rest of their lives. So, yeah, I'm incredibly excited. I've been funneling everything I've been learning and developing about happiness hacking, collaboration superpowers, amplified individuals, and collective intelligence gaming into this one. Plus a lot of new high-tech toys and tricks.

Congrats for all your accomplishments over the last year. The Ministry of Reshelving Project in 2005 was one of the coolest projects I was ever able to participate in. I'm sure the other people that joined in around the world felt the same way.

I love the Ministry of Reshelving project, and personally I like the idea advanced by SF0 and others, to crowd-source our common environment. Making a crass billboard legal, but not "She Loves The Moon," seems out of touch with what sort of visual world people actually might like to live in. (Hmmm, World Without Billboards?) I know some people found MoR invasive, so I can only imagine what they think of shopdropping, but I personally would feel better walking into a Starbucks if I knew that a crowd of shopdroppers had been there ahead of me, to breathe some frigging life into the place.

Jane, have you by any chance read the book "Join Me!" by Danny Wallace?

If you haven't, i highly recommend it. It is the humorous story of how Danny essentially accidentally creates a cult. (not that kind of cult!)

"On a lark, journalist Danny Wallace placed an ad in a small London paper that offered two simple words: 'JOIN ME.' What followed was astounding."

He essentially takes this accidental collective of people and uses them to improve the lives of people around the world (at least as far as I am in the book!). Many of the story of the joinees and Danny parallels some of the themes I've seen in your work. Plus, it's just a fun, great read!

On the subject of Massively Multiplayer Science, have you read anything by Yochai Benkler? The 9th chapter in his book The Wealth of Networks has some interesting ideas on how internet communities could be used for agricultural and biomedical research.

About Me

I'm a game designer, a games researcher, and a future forecaster. I make games that give a damn. I study how games change lives. I spend a lot of my time figuring out how the games we play today shape our real-world future. And so I'm trying to make sure that a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032. Learn more here in my bio or get my contact information on my contact page.